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Little Republics

Little Republics

The Story of Bungalow Bliss

Edited by

Author: Adrian Duncan
€15,00 EUR
€15,00 EUR
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Bungalow Bliss, first published in 1971, was a book of house designs that buyers could use to build a home for themselves affordably. It first appeared two years before Ireland was to join the EEC as a self-published catalogue by Jack Fitzsimons from his Kells Art Studios in County Meath. He and his wife designed and collated it and printed it locally.

Fitzsimons sold these books out of his car to newsagents, petrol garages and bookshops.

Over the course of thirty years, Fitzsimons sold over a quarter of a million copies of his catalogue. The first edition contained twenty designs – the final edition contained two hundred and sixty.

This guidebook of how to build your own home radically transformed housing in Ireland. Now, for the first time, author and structural engineer Adrian Duncan looks at the cultural impact that Bungalow Bliss and the accessible bungalow design had on the housing market, the Irish landscape, and on the individual families who made these bungalows their homes.

Details

ISBN: 9781843518488

Extent: 172

Published:

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Praise and Reviews

  • ‘Fascinating and poignant. It made me see the familiar architecture of the Irish countryside with utterly new eyes and unexpected tenderness.’– Sara Baume

  • ‘Terrific … Duncan brings a poet-engineer’s eye to the houses and fleshes out the fascinating socio-economic background, the circumstances which gave rise to the bungalow boom.’ – Michael Moynihan, Irish Examiner

  • ‘Provides gentle questions about major unexplored assumptions about modern Irish society … evoke[s] the spare storytelling of the late John McGahern … builds a layered story that provides the backdrop to so much that became magical moments in modern Irish literature and drama … important, thoughtful and insightful.’ – Conor Skehan, Sunday Independent

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About the Author

Adrian Duncan was born in County Longford and originally trained as an engineer. He is a Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker. His short fictions have appeared in literary journals both in Ireland and the USA. His acclaimed debut novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site, published by Lilliput and Head of Zeus in 2019. He was shortlisted for the Emerging Writer Award at the inaugural 2020 Dalkey Literary Awards and won the inaugural John McGahern Annual Book Prize. His second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, was published by Lilliput in 2020 and is forthcoming from Profile Books. It was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2021. His first short story collection, Midfield Dynamo, was published in 2021 and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His most recent novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, has been shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

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